New Perspectives In The Objective Evaluation Of Animal Welfare, With Focus On The Domestic Pig

ABSTRACT

Animal welfare can be viewed as the result of integrating repeated affective evaluations of success in coping with environmental challenges, i.e., subjective challenge adequacy.  The present work summarizes why established physiological and behavioral welfare parameters are inadequate to assess challenge adequacy. Behavioral tests based on the mood-congruent judgment effect and physiologic parameters based on components of the somatotropic axis are proposed as an alternative. Here, the judgment bias measures an animal’s subjective confidence to cope successfully with a challenge, which is in turn modulated by the animal’s previous experience. The somatotropic axis incorporates the insulin-like growth factor (IGF) and its binding proteins (IGFBP), which are involved in the regulation of metabolism and growth. First results indicate that in particular IGF-1 and IGFBP-3 react with higher latency and higher inertness to short-term stressful events than established physiological stress parameters. Before these indicators can be utilized for overall welfare assessment, further validation studies are necessary that provide more insights into how repeatable the measurements are under different conditions and which other factors may confound the measures.

KEYWORDS:

• Overall welfare assessment
• GH/IGF-1 axis
• judgment bias
• domestic pig

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful for various critical discussions with Lisa Rose Moscovice and for her linguistic revision. We would also like to thank Sandra Düpjan for her conceptual and editorial contributions in an early version of this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.